About election-atlas.ca

Welcome to the newly redesigned election atlas. We hope the site is now more elegant and more user-friendly.

For elections where poll-by-poll maps are available, click on any riding to zoom to it and load the poll map. You can toggle between viewing riding and poll results by clicking the radio buttons in the top right corner.

Poll results are now represented by dots. The size of the dot indicates the total number of votes cast in each poll, the opacity of the dot represents the margin of victory.

You can now view poll results for as many ridings as you like on the same map, although loading too many can slow down the site's performance.

Who? I'm J.P. Kirby and I'm just a regular guy interested in politics and elections. I'm also a map geek. Those two passions came together to form this site.
I have never been actively involved in any political party, and right now no party comes close to matching my political views.

What? The eventual goal is to have riding-by-riding maps of every federal and provincial election since 1867, with poll-by-poll results for as many as possible. There's a lot of research and map drawing yet to be done, and a lot of sources yet to be uncovered, so if you have any leads, let me know.
For the uninitiated, each riding is divided by Elections Canada (or provincial authorities) into polling divisions, each covering a specific geographic area and about 400 voters. Each polling division has its own voters list and ballot box, and voters have to vote in their own local poll. The poll-by-poll breakdown of the results is released by Elections Canada within 2-3 months after the election. (In some cases, larger polling divisions are split into two or more polls, or smaller polls have their results merged with others to preserve voter secrecy. This site has adjusted the maps and data accordingly.)

Why? The idea for the site came shortly after Elections Canada released polling division GIS shapefiles to the public for the first time in 2009. I've always believed that the best way to understand how a riding voted the way it did was by analyzing the poll-by-poll results. They've always been made available to the public, but they were only linked to a poll number, which corresponds to a given neighbourhood. Until 2009, there was no way for average joes to know exactly which polls were located where, unless you were willing to pay big bucks to Elections Canada for paper maps.
Although there have already been efforts to map poll-by-poll results since then (including Stephen Taylor's excellent Google Earth maps, several posters on the uselectionatlas.org forums, and my earlier work on the506.com in 2011), I believe this marks the first and most user-friendly public effort to display results and trends across elections.
As of spring 2013, 7 of the 10 provincial electoral commissions also make polling division shapefiles available online.

How? (warning: lots of tech jargon ahead!) Unlike a lot of other sites, the maps are not created from a SQL database. The poll-by-poll results were compiled from the official sources into an Excel file, where they were massaged and sorted. This file was then joined to the relevant GIS shapefile in QGIS, where they were then split into separate files for each riding and converted to the GEOJSON format. These GEOJSON files are then displayed on the site using OpenLayers (which is a lot more versatile than the direct Google Maps API).

What's next? Once the federal and provincial data is finished, a very long-term project is to try and find a way to import demographic data into the site, to see if voting patterns can be determined from income, age, language or ethnicity.
Data from advance and mobile polls, along with special ballots, are not found on the site at this time, although they can be found in Elections Canada's official reports as well as Alice Funke's punditsguide.ca.

So how can I get in touch? I'm always looking for suggestions or ways to improve the site. Send me an e-mail, or follow me on twitter.

Poll Maps

Poll-by-poll maps are currently available for the following elections:

Federal: 1997 and laterNewfoundland and Labrador: 2011 and later Nova Scotia: 2009 and laterPrince Edward Island: 2007 and laterNew Brunswick: 2010 and laterQuebec: 2008 and laterOntario: 2003 and laterManitoba: 2011 and laterSaskatchewan: 2011 and laterAlberta: 2004 and laterBritish Columbia: 2005 and later

Sources

election-atlas.ca gathers its results from primary sources whenever possible. Results generally come from the official reports from the relevant election authorities, if available online or at local libraries here in Fredericton. The federal Library of Parliament and the legislative libraries in BC, Quebec and Nova Scotia also have full riding-by-riding results dating back to Confederation on their sites; and I have also been able to locate hard-copy compendiums of election results for New Brunswick, PEI, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. For other provinces, gaps were filled using back issues of the Canadian Parliamentary Guide.

Maps are adapted from official GIS shapefiles, if available. For older elections, I created my own shapefiles from scratch, using either official static maps or boundary descriptions from provincial statutes. In some cases riding boundaries have been simplified, particularly in rural or uninhabited areas. I am human and errors do occur, although I take care in making sure their effects are minimized.

Party Abbreviations

Note: Parties were often not formal regulated political organizations as we know them today until the 1970s. Candidates could often choose any label they wanted, and some supported more than one party. On the atlas, candidates who did not run under a major party banner, but were still known to caucus with or support one, are coloured for that major party, but listed with their party abbreviation as seen below.